Chapter Twenty-One #2
Mark didn’t answer verbally, but Cici’s shrieks of laughter told me he was tickling her to get his phone back. The laughter died out and then he said, “This had better be important, I’m a little busy right now.”
“Your sister sounds really happy to have you home,” I said.
He paused. “Annie?”
“Yup.”
“I did not expect to hear from you so soon.”
“Because I’m supposed to be off on a suicide mission recovering my cousin?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I was. And then I got tossed out of Johrlar by the collective that’s in charge of the place. Only they didn’t return Sarah when they made us leave, and Artie’s pretty insistent that we need to go back and get her before she can get hurt.”
“Artie?” Mark sounded utterly baffled.
Artie leaned closer. “Hello, Mark. Glad to hear you’re not dead, not sure why we’re calling you. Just so you know.”
“Mark, I know you’re a king now, whatever that means. Can you bend space the way Sarah can?”
“Getting right to the point, huh?” Mark lowered his voice. “Yes, I can manage a tesseract. Why do you ask?”
“I will text you the latitude and longitude of my grandparents’ house in Michigan,” I said. “I need you to come here.”
“What? No! Cici—”
“Just got you back, which means she’ll understand if you say you need to help rescue the woman who made sure you were taken care of while you recovered,” I said.
“Sarah needs us, and I’m not going back to Johrlar without at least a little protection.
Don’t argue with me. You’re only going to waste your time and mine. ”
“Your family still sucks,” he said sullenly. “Text me the info, and I’ll be right over. But only this one time, and only because you’re right—Sarah took care of me while I was going through my final instar. I’ll help you bring her home.”
“Thank you,” said Artie.
“Don’t thank me too much—once she’s here, she’s your problem,” said Mark. “I am not going to take over babysitting the most neurotic mathematician in the world.”
“I’d fight you for her,” said Artie.
Mark laughed and the line went dead. I grabbed my phone off the table. “Be right back,” I said to Sam and Artie, before running into the kitchen to get the data I’d promised Mark.
A cuckoo king on our side could swing the balance from “impossible” to “improbable.” And improbable is where I’ve historically done some of my best work.
As expected, Thomas knew the exact latitude and longitude of the house to a full eight digits, meaning we could aim Mark either inside or outside. Which was why Sam and I were back in the field behind the house, this time joined by an anxious Artie who couldn’t seem to stop himself from fidgeting.
Sam looked at him sidelong. “My guy, I’m usually the one who can’t sit still. Can you try to chill? Just a little, maybe?”
“Sarah’s in another dimension surrounded by people who abducted her to put her on trial, and I can’t help her until I find a way to get back there, so yeah, I’m anxious as hell, and no, I’m not going to chill.
Not even a little bit.” Artie looked stubbornly at Sam.
“I don’t think you’d chill if you were in my position. ”
Sam winced. “Fuck, dude, it’s still Iowa for you, isn’t it?”
“Effectively, yeah,” said Artie. He sagged in place, looking suddenly exhausted.
“This is all going to hit me like a ton of bricks real soon, and when it does, it’s going to put me on the floor.
I don’t even know how long it’s been. But you’re telling me I’ve been dead, and my mother died, and Sarah’s been living with the weight of having killed me—killed us both—when she didn’t kill either one of us.
And for me, I just followed her through a rift in the world to save her from a ritual that would have ended everything and taken her away from me forever. ”
“I forgot how awful that was while it was happening,” said Sam.
“I got a little wrapped up in how awful everything that came next was. I’m sorry, Artie.
I’d be freaking out just as hard as you are.
I did freak out just as hard as you are, when I came back from patrol and got told that the air had become a door and Annie had gone through it without me, and no one knew where she was, so it wasn’t like I could even go after her.
” His gaze turned briefly distant. “I would have freaked out even harder if I’d realized that it was going to be a whole year before she made it home.
Time doesn’t always work the same between dimensions.
I don’t know how long we were in Johrlar. ”
“Long enough for the leaves to change,” I said, gesturing toward the forest. “Long enough for the woods to get cranky about how long we were gone.”
I don’t have the same relationship with the Galway Woods that my grandmother does, and that’s a good thing, since Sam can be the jealous type.
Alice has been in a three-way relationship with the woods and my grandfather for almost as long as she’s been alive, and don’t ask me how it works, because I don’t understand it.
I don’t think anyone does. The woods are self-aware and questionably sapient, and knowing that has been enough to keep me from pissing them off beyond the point of making amends.
“We’ll figure out the timeline when we have Sarah back,” said Artie stubbornly. “We’re not giving up on her.”
“Wow, nerdy boy with the bad taste in women, long time no see,” said Mark from behind us.
I turned. He was standing in the field, looking surprisingly good for a man who’d just come out of an eight-year coma.
As always, he looked enough like Sarah to have been her brother, and was wearing cargo pants and a gray cable-knit sweater.
His hair looked freshly cut, and had been styled with a quantity of gel that was ambitious if not advisable.
He was eyeing the three of us with one eyebrow cocked and lips pursed in faint disapproval.
“And the pyro and the monkey for good measure. Hail hail, the gang’s all here. ”
“Hi, Mark,” I said, not bothering to sound too enthusiastic. “How’s being awake treating you?”
“Oh, great, now that my little sister doesn’t want to strangle me for getting myself hurt in the first place,” he said. “She’s twenty, and I’m mad about it. I missed so much. Fortunately, she missed me too, and I’ve looked through her memories. It’s almost like I was there.”
If he wanted it, his sister would gradually start to believe he’d been there all along.
Cuckoos are tricky that way. It was part of why I’d had so much trouble trusting Sarah after she erased my memories of our mutual childhood.
Anything that felt like affection or compassion had just seemed like an illusion after that, making it difficult for me to believe in her sincerity.
Now that I remembered who we were to each other, I felt bad about the way I’d treated her. Not bad enough to leave her behind when we might be able to get her back, but bad, like I was a smaller person than I’d ever realized.
“So she’s good?” I asked.
“She is,” he said, a beatific expression spreading across his face.
“She never forgot about me, and she’s going to law school to try and help people like me—people who aren’t technically human, but still have to exist in a world where humans write the rules.
She was an awesome kid, and she’s an amazing woman now. ”
He sounded utterly besotted, and well he should.
Mark was the only cuckoo we knew of who had broken his prenatal programming without outside help.
Sarah had been deprogrammed by her mother.
Mark had gone through a normal cuckoo puberty, waking up one morning with an innate desire to destroy anyone who got in his way.
His human baby sister had managed to distract him long enough for the initial rush of homicidal urges to pass, and he’d decided to let his family live for her sake.
Anyone who could convince a cuckoo that a rampage of destruction was less important than playing tea party was someone I could respect without ever meeting them.
“Okay, can we go?” asked Artie.
Mark turned to frown at him. “Hey. I didn’t agree to go anywhere, and I’m not sure where you want us to go, so no. Not without more information.”
“I told you Sarah was on Johrlar,” I said.
“You did,” Mark agreed. “But I don’t know how to get to Johrlar. I’ve never been there. I’m an American citizen. I was born here. Telling me Sarah’s in the cuckoo equivalent of the old country doesn’t help me navigate.”
“The collective of Johrlac queens tossed us from their dimension back into my grandparents’ basement,” I said. “I’m betting the traces of the math they used will still be there. You can use that to follow the trail back to where we were. That’s the last place we saw Sarah.”
“All right,” said Mark. “You three stay here. I don’t trust you not to break something while I’m gone.”
“Gone?” asked Artie, sounding stunned.
“My sister just got me back. You’re right that I owe Sarah—she may have triggered my instar, but she took care of me until I could recover, and she took care of my family.
Cici loves her. It’s hard not to love someone who visits you and brings you gifts for eight years when your brother can’t.
She’ll want me to save Sarah. But I’m not vanishing on her for six months or whatever without telling her where I’m going.
No one gets to ask that of me, ever again. ”
His eyes flashed white and the air next to him tore, creating an opening. He stepped through it and was gone. Artie blinked.
“That’s like the rift Sarah made.”
“Yeah, she does that all the time now,” said Sam. “Getting her to hold still is sort of basically impossible. But I bet she’ll hold still more with you home. She’s missed you real, real bad, Artie.”
“I know I haven’t been me, technically speaking, but I’ve missed her too,” said Artie.