Chapter Twenty-One #3
Something was moving at the edge of the woods off to our left.
I lit my hands, wary of the many things that could come out of the Galway.
Bears and moose were possible, but unlikely; they didn’t tend to survive long around here, not with all the nastier options the trees kept tucked away.
Whatever it was didn’t look humanoid, which meant it wasn’t the neighbors, friendly or otherwise.
That left way too many options for me to be comfortable.
Then the shape put several of its legs past the tree line, into the light, and I relaxed, even as Artie shrieked. Sam gave him a curious look.
“What’s up?”
“That is a spider the size of a bear!” shouted Artie.
“I think of him as more the size of a draft horse,” said Sam. “Look, Annie, Greg’s okay.”
“He must have gone into diapause to survive the winter,” I said. “Plenty of good hunting for him out here in the woods, even if Cynthia hadn’t been bringing him sheep.”
The giant spider continued making his cautious way toward us, emerging fully into the light and keeping low to the ground.
“It’s all right, Artie,” I said. “This is Greg. He belongs to Sarah. He’s basically her emotional support animal.”
“None of us were qualified for the job,” said Sam. “She needed something she could hold on to, and a giant spider from another dimension turned out to be just the thing.”
“What,” said Artie.
Greg was still approaching. Spiders don’t have ears, as such, but they can still hear by picking up vibrations with the small hairs on their bodies.
Jumping spiders are especially good at detecting human voices.
He moved faster and with more ease as he recognized our voices.
It’s hard to say what excitement looks like in a spider, but he was walking tall and waving his pedipalps at us like an eager puppy.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, as he got closer. “Sarah’s not with us yet, but we’re going back to get her. Yes, we are. Yes, we are. Who’s a good horrifying abomination of the local laws of nature? You are. What a good boy.”
He walked up to me and nudged his massive head against my leg. I scratched him gently behind the eyes, on the flat part of his head, while Artie just stared.
“I feel like I should remember something about this, but it’s all hazy, like a dream,” he said, in a stilted voice.
“That’s because she adopted him after she scrambled our memories, and it sounds like that’s the demarcation for you. Everything that happened after Iowa.”
“His name’s Greg?”
“To be fair, she wasn’t thinking about the long term when she called him that, just about having a name for him so we’d treat him like a dog or something and not a terrifying arachnid nightmare.”
“He looks like a Greg,” said Artie, moving closer to the spider.
That was a pretty good sign. Of multiple things, really.
He was feeling enough like himself to want a closer look at Greg, and he wasn’t going to try making Sarah get rid of him or anything ridiculous like that.
Every little test the universe threw at him, he was passing.
He was really back.
Artie had been the first member of our generation to go down—until Dominic, the only member of our generation.
We’d all grown up knowing that we were in a dangerous line of work connected to half a dozen dangerous hobbies, but it hadn’t been until I saw Artie on the ground staring blankly at the sky that it had really started to sink in.
We could die. We weren’t immortal. Having him back didn’t change the bone-deep horror of that moment.
Artie began to scratch the top of Greg’s head, emulating me, and Greg leaned against him, apparently content. Artie grinned at me, looking momentarily unburdened in his sheer delight. “I think he likes me,” he said.
“What’s not to like?” asked Sam.
Artie eyed him. “Do you want that in alphabetical order?”
“Boys, let’s not fight,” I said. “We have an ill-advised cross-dimensional rescue to attempt.” Where the hell was Mark?
Greg perked up, and I turned to follow the line of his gaze. My grandparents were making their way across the field toward us.
“I tried to open a path to Johrlar,” said Thomas, once they were close enough to speak without shouting. “It fizzled, hard. I think they’ve blocked the passage.”
“Which makes a certain amount of sense, under the circumstances,” I said. “We’re still going. They won’t have blocked the passage against their own flavor of magic.”
“Blocking the universe’s access to basic mathematics isn’t something you can do without disastrous consequences,” said Alice.
“Anyway, we’re willing to come with you if you want us.
We’ve talked about it”—the glance she sent at Thomas made it clear that she’d been the one doing most of the talking—“and I can use one of my remaining crossings if we need me to.”
“By which she means she’ll be using all of her remaining crossings, as Johrlar is not a direct transit from here by her methods, and that she’ll only be able to bring one person with her if she wants to bring Sarah home.”
“So that’s out,” I said bluntly. “We all know you’re not letting her go alone, and we also know Artie’s not staying behind. I think it’s better if the two of you stay here in case we don’t come back.”
The air tore and Mark stepped out, now with a backpack slung over one shoulder.
He stopped dead, blinking at the scene in front of him.
“Okay,” he said, in a strangled tone. “Two tattooed weirdoes I can see fitting in with the rest of the family, but why is there a giant spider here? And why are we not running and screaming and maybe also dying?”
“Do you remember the giant spiders on the other side of Iowa?” I asked. “Well, Sarah brought one of them back with her when we all came home. His name is Greg, he helps with her anxiety, he’s a very good boy. And the tattooed weirdoes are my grandparents.”
“Does your asshole family not age?”
“We do,” said Thomas. “My wife and I just stopped for a little while so we could find each other again.”
“You say that like it’s totally reasonable and not actually sort of insane,” said Mark.
“All right, assholes. Cici says you’d better bring me back in one piece and before she graduates from law school.
I was gone long enough that she’s sort of resigned about me going away, so you’d better never ask me to do this again.
I am not spending the rest of my life with my baby sister waiting for me to disappear. ”
“Believe it or not, we understand the feeling,” said Alice. “What’s the plan?”
“If pyro here”—Mark hooked a thumb in my direction—“can really take me to the place where the Johrlac threw you people back into this dimension, I should hopefully be able to reconstruct their math. From there, I’ll open a tunnel to the other end.”
“And how do we know this is going to work?” asked Alice. “It took Sarah quite a while to get a hang of transit like that.”
“I have some advantages she doesn’t,” said Mark.
“I slept through the bulk of my instar. The hive woke her up and put her to work while she was still sore and off-balance. I’ve had time to recover.
And I’ve already been through a dimensional crossing while I was conscious.
I know what the math feels like. It’s not going to be smooth and it’s not going to be pretty and the more information you can give me, the better.
But I should be able to do this, and I should be able to transport myself and three other people.
Four is a stable number. The math will support it. ”
“What about Sarah?” asked Artie. “She’d make five.”
“Sarah is a cuckoo queen with years of experience on me,” said Mark.
“The only reason she can’t tunnel between dimensions is that no one’s really shown her how.
Well, she was transported by the people you say took her, and now I’m going to transport us in, which means I can give her further instructions.
She’ll know what to do. She’ll be able to get herself back. ”
He didn’t remind us that if she couldn’t move herself between dimensions, it would probably be because her captors had broken her in some irreparable way.
He didn’t need to, just like I didn’t need telepathy to see the understanding flicker in Artie’s eyes.
We all knew how high the stakes were, just like we all knew there was no way he was going to let us leave her there.
If we tried, he’d just do what Grandma Alice had done, and claw at the walls of the world until he found a way through them to the other side.
As a family, we knew how toxic that could be, and how hard on the people who loved you. So we were going with him now to save him from making bigger mistakes later.
“Greg, go back to the trees,” I said, tapping Greg on the head and gesturing toward the woods. “Grandma, can you go play with Greg for a little while? He needs someone to pay attention to him.”
“He’s been lonely, the poor boy. Come on, Greggie.
Let’s go for a walk.” She began bounding toward the tree line, waving for Greg to follow her.
After a moment, he did, which really meant leaping ahead of her and then stopping to let her catch up with him.
Thomas stayed where he was, smiling fondly as he watched her go.
“So I suppose that means I’m staying here,” he said, once Alice and Greg had vanished into the trees.
He turned to face me, expression going grave.
“Be careful, Annie. I don’t want to tell your parents that we lost you.
” Unspoken was the fact that if Artie didn’t come back, his father and sister would never know that he had returned to begin with—not unless they spoke to the Michigan Aeslin mice.
It would only hurt them more to know that they could have had him back again, only to lose the chance before they knew they had it.
“You won’t,” I said. “We’ll be home before you know it.”
I started for the house, Mark, Sam, and Artie following me, and every step took us closer to doing something we weren’t going to be able to take back, and that was part of how I knew it was the right thing to do. The right thing is almost always hard. That’s what stops some people from doing it.
The fear of being taken apart by a hive of angry telepathic wasps stops the rest.
I climbed the steps to the back door and opened it, waving the others into the kitchen. Once they were through, I let the door bang shut behind me as I followed them inside.