Chapter 23 #2
“Eh. If you get to visit the land of the shapeshifting monkey people and they’re all total losers, are you really going to be their biggest fan?
Or are you going to be all ‘Gosh I’m glad I don’t live here’?
” Mark shrugged again. “These people are my species, but they’re not my friends, or my family.
We don’t have anything in common but some shitty ancestral memories—which I don’t even have anymore, by the way.
Sarah ripped them out of me like a really nasty weed. ”
I winced at the imagery. I knew what it was like to have my memories removed, and I had resented it for a long time.
Mark didn’t sound resentful. He sounded bitter, but almost grateful at the same time, like she had done him an immense favor that he didn’t really have the words to properly describe.
The streets were as busy as they’d been on our previous visit.
Other than the char damage to the administrative building, most of which had already been repaired, there was nothing to show that we’d been here at all.
People walked in every direction, some accompanied by large insects, some pushing strollers.
There were more children than there’d been before, and several of them stopped to point at our Kairos guards, eyes flashing.
“Uh, guys?” I said.
An adult moved toward one of the groups of pointing children, following their fingers to look directly at us.
“Guys,” I repeated, with more urgency.
“What?” asked Mark.
I pointed at the children who were pointing at us, beginning to amass a small crowd of adults who stared and muttered, their eyes flashing on and off like fireflies.
One of the Kairos guards swore. “Their children can see us better than they can, because they haven’t outgrown believing the evidence of their eyes,” he said. “If the children can show the adults where we are, we can be found.”
“Meaning…?”
“Run.”
The guards took off with the ease and speed of a trained unit, running away from the velvet worm and heading down the street toward the hulking, lightly charred shape of the central building.
Sam leapt onto the back of the velvet worm, sweeping Mark and Artie—our least physically fit members—under his arms, and ran after the guards.
I brought up the rear, hands lighting up.
If these people decided to chase us, they were going to find out the hard way that no one wants to be the main character at a barbecue.
The administration building was swarming with Johrlac, but we ran right by it, heading for the stone structure on the other side. One of the Kairos dropped back to pace me.
“We know a way in through the rear,” he said. “The queens stay here when not acting in a public capacity. They recognize that stone is a better protection.”
“Against what?”
“Everything,” he said. “Their own people—they live in fear of another collective rising in their shadow, as they once rose in the last collective’s shadow.
Only one queen in a hive, after all. They’ve solved that by finding a way to combine many queens into one, but that doesn’t change the instinctive response to a challenger. ”
The children had been left far behind us, and the adults they’d clued into our presence were equally far back, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be some sort of an alarm.
We kept running, and when we reached the stone building, the guards circled around behind it, to a stretch of wall made from the papery material that comprised so much of the city.
I blinked at it, then looked at the guard I had been running beside.
“They prefer the comfort of their nests,” he said.
“The paper is breathable and lets the air circulate more freely. It keeps things from getting too stuffy. They view it as almost sacred, in a way, and while they will cut it to make doors when none are present, they only do so when they can make immediate repairs.”
More of the guards were fanning out to begin slicing through the wall, removing it in a single massive piece.
“We can put this back when we’re done with it, and because it’s unthinkable that someone would mess with the paper in such a way, none of the Johrlac will go looking for the seams,” explained my guard.
I looked at him, askance. “For a telepathic society, they sure do ignore a lot of warning signs.”
“They decided a long time ago what they were and were not willing to see, and they shut out everything else,” said the guard. “It’s the danger of reaching what you consider perfection. Anything that challenges it must be set aside.”
“Did your timing tell you that?”
“No,” he said patiently. “My common sense did. Now come. We’re close to the chamber of the collective.”
We poured through the hole where the paper had been, guards surrounding my little group, Mark walking at the very center, like he wanted to keep his presence a surprise for as long as possible.
With the anti-telepathy charm around my neck, I couldn’t tell whether Sarah’s static was present, and I was almost afraid to check.
Artie wasn’t. He reached up and took his own charm off, stuffing it into his pocket as he closed his eyes and kept walking. After a few seconds, he sagged and looked over at me. “I can’t feel her,” he said.
“Maybe they’re suppressing her somehow?” I suggested.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think—from what they were saying while they were in my head—I think there’s a good chance she isn’t anymore.”
“Not here?”
“Not anywhere.” He looked at me bleakly. “I think they maybe did to Sarah what Sarah did to me, only they did it on purpose.”
“Sounds great,” said Mark. Artie, Sam, and I all shot him horrified looks.
He shrugged. “What? We know that sort of thing can be undone. If she’s alive and just not in her own head right now, we put her back where she belongs and everything is fine.
We go home, you assholes leave me alone, we’re all happy. ”
“You have a very pragmatic way of looking at the world,” said Sam.
Mark shrugged. “I took a nap and woke up with phenomenal cosmic powers, having missed my sister’s entire time in high school.
I’d trade the powers for the time if that were an option.
Knowing that I can’t makes everything else seem a lot less urgent.
All I want to do now is get through whatever’s next and move the fuck on. ”
“It must be nice to be that sure of what you want,” said Artie dolefully. He didn’t put his charm back on.
“Aren’t you?” asked Mark. “I thought we were here because you wanted your very own telepathic wasp to take home and call ‘baby.’”
“No,” said Artie. “I only want the right one.”
“And you’re stressed out because she may be taking a little break from existing? Dude, you have got to chill.”
“That’s normally my line,” said Sam.
We were working our way deeper and deeper into the stone building as they talked.
The walls here were largely made of stone, sturdier than they were in the only other Johrlac building I had seen.
Harder to burn, too. I made note of the material as we walked, keeping my hands lit.
The white flame was a recent development, something I’d been working hard to stabilize.
It was hotter than my normal fire by a significant measure, and harder to see if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
It didn’t take any more attention or focus than regular red flames did, so why not go with the more destructive option?
The Johrlac disdain for furniture continued in this building.
The halls were empty, no shelves, no seating, and it wasn’t until we had worked our way well into the building that I even started to see doorways off the hall we were walking along.
Straight lines and no frills, that seemed to be the Johrlac way.
If anything could have reinforced the idea that Sarah wasn’t like these people, it was the minimalism of their world.
Her room—both her rooms, Oregon and Ohio—had always been a textured maze of trinkets and posters, a snapshot of her life as she preferred to live in it.
She would never have chosen this sort of austere precision.
I could see where a mathematician might look at the perfection of the architecture and believe that it needed to be showcased.
To people who lived and breathed numeric perfection, this was probably the high of beautiful décor.
We turned a corner, and found ourselves confronted with a long wall made of paper. I could see shadows moving on the other side, backlit by whatever they were using to light their space. All conversation had died.
I looked to the guard who’d been pacing me, and mouthed, Is this it?
He looked baffled. The mind-mind flowers could clarify language, but not the shape a word left on the lips. I leaned in closer, whispering, “Is that the collective?”
“Ah. No,” he whispered back.
I nodded understanding, and we kept moving deeper.
The longer we walked, the more apparent it became that the building was constructed in a series of concentric circles, each one slightly smaller than the last. There were chambers in the rings, marked by paper walls and occasional voices, but on the whole, each ring was empty until it merged with the next along the line.
We moved deeper and deeper, and the rings began to show signs of actual use.
We were maybe five rings in when we stepped into what I could only describe as a nursery.
The walls were lined with hex-shaped cubbies, each one occupied by an infant or small child—I’d estimate up to two or three years old, as humans measured growth.
They sucked on bud-shaped bottles or scooped pollen out of flowers with tiny hands, eating and staring blankly into the distance.
None of them cried or babbled or anything I would have expected from babies.